Nathan Grennan wrote:
David Boles wrote:
You are going to have explain the logic for this one for me to
understand.
"Excessive fsync during a kernel compile causes Firefox 3 become
completely unresponsive till the fsyncs are complete. In some cases if
something else i/o intensive is going on Firefox 3 will freeze till the
other i/o has completely finished. If it gets really really bad other
applications start freezing."
You were doing something as intensive as compiling a kernel and Firefox
became "unresponsive" and that is Firefox's fault?
It is about perspective. From one perspective it is Firefox 3's fault,
in another it is the ext3 code's fault.
In the first perspective Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.0b2 don't do it, but
Firefox 3.0b3 and later do. In general I would say it might even be fine
for Firefox to do one fsync per page, but it seems to do like eight back
to back. Which in my book is excessive. Maybe there is a good reason for
it, maybe it can be improved. I don't claim to know much about Firefox
3's code, but I can give the evidence to the programmers and let them
sort it out.
In the second perspective it is more of a problem with ext3 code. It
doesn't handle fsyncs that well when it comes to responsiveness. I do
plan to take this up with the maintainers of the ext3 code. If I can't
get them to fix this to my satisfaction I will switch to another
filesystem, and maybe another distribution that supports that filesystem
well.
Okay. Still trying to understand this.
Is the 'fsync' problem, the differences for you, with the same page? I ask
because so many pages are so very active today. If it is a page, or
several? If you would like I would try them from here.
The page, http://www.news.com.au/, that was in the beginning of this
thread, is in IMO a pig of ads and Flash. And without the 'protection' of
the two extensions that I mentioned it did bog down my Firefox for a
second or two. Somewhat but not much. But nowhere near as the OP, and
others, talked about in their posts.
I honestly do *not* see the halts that you, and others, nor the other
things many are writing about here. And this was using Firefox 3.0bpre5.
I am puzzled. Unless it could be differences in Internet access or
differences in hardware perhaps? Or a combination of differences in both?
--
David
